Memories, Nonetheless
by icecreamlova
Summary: Daja/Polyam. You closed us off like a parenthesis/Left me knowing just enough to miss. For kitty ryan. WIP


**Memories, Nonetheless**  
_By icecreamlova_  
Part 1

- : -

The morning is cool and grey and holding its breath, waiting to blush with dawn. Daja stands in the shadows cast by giant lakeside boulders, running her fingers over the crystals embedded in their rose-colored matrix. The crystals are cold and unyielding to the touch, smoothed by the numberless fingers of the pilgrims who came before her, and she thinks, with a touch of impatience, that Evvy would love to have come. Despite the multitudes of visitors, there is a sense of profound isolation about the place, wind-ruffled grassland to the east and craggy mountains in every other direction. When the sun is at just the right angle, the holy place will blaze, a lake of fire ringed by mineral stars. A place of worship, for a volcano goddess less known, but far older, than Shurri Firesword.

Because she has long since memorized the rhythm of the approaching footsteps, Daja does not turn around. She feels the warm presence at her back, the breaths coming out in huffs, just far enough from her earlobe she can pretend there is enough room in her small gap for two people. Daja thinks she hears someone's breath hitch when a puff of air brushes the back of her neck, but it passes in an instant. Winded, her companion bends so that Daja can feel the brush of a thick crown of hair by her arm.

"You know how to pick them," Polyam says, around a half-aborted cough.

Daja grins at this. "I didn't get up early enough. There's nowhere else to stand."

There is a pause while, Daja assumes, Polyam takes in the sight before her. Already the lake lightens in accompaniment to the scarlet beginning to tinge the sky, and from their place among the boulders they can see the reflections of countless other travelers lying in wait. A small boy leans perilously close to falling in and his mother, who wears her Namornese furs and carries his in a rolled up bundle, grabs the back of his tunic with her free hand to keep him from violating the sanctity of the lake's glassy surface.

"It's not so bad," Polyam says at last. Her voice is deep and pleasant, and Daja always remembers again just how much so the first time they talk each day. "There's no one threatening _us_ with crying children."

"I think the child is screaming, actually," says Daja, straight-faced.

"All the better that we're far away," Polyam says. Her staff thumps against the ground as she settles for a more stable position. "And this place very hard to find for people like _them_." _Kaqs_, she means. "You either have extraordinary skill or extraordinary luck."

Daja bites back a chuckle at Polyam's wry tone. There are still some minutes until dawn, so she returns to her inspection of the crystals. There are veins of minerals embedded below the surface, singing against the gleaming brass of her skin, and it takes her several moments to sort through the notes chiming in her mind. Woven into the bedrock are layers and layers of spells, refreshed weekly, to prevent the thieves among the many visitors.

She must have made some sound of surprise, because Polyam answers with a questioning one.

"The last time I felt so many traps against thieves," Daja explains, "was in the very valuable glasshouse of a very paranoid Dedicate. And _those_ spells I could see."

"You'd think religious sorts would be more trusting," Polyam mutters, voice very dry.

Rosethorn's visage pops unbidden into her mind, one dark eyebrow raised bockingly at the mere concept of trusting by default. Daja shrugs. "Caution is universal among humans except for _hamots_ and student mages."

Polyam's laughter is like a crow cawing, somehow harsher than the situation merits, and Daja wonders at it. "You're probably right. There _is_ a saying the people here find it worthwhile to keep alive: Irod's northern mountain gods taught their followers to fear them, worship them, and place spells to trap the fingers of godless thieves."

Polyam would know the people like the back of her hand, and she has always been a treasure trove of such knowledge whenever the world wasn't shifting around her. There's still so much she could tell her, show her. Daja smiles, but before an instant has passed, it flickers and vanishes like dawn mist.

The slightest edge of morning sun surges beyond the horizon, throwing the sky into a disarray of scarlet, and Daja watches the spectacle determinedly. The lake looks like there's an underlying layer of wine, darkened in places by the reflections of the looming mountains, and the glittering crystals, beneath her hand and all around her, throws out light that gives everything a soft halo. It should be an amazing sight - _is_ an amazing sight - but the back of her neck prickles with awareness: Polyam's proximity, Polyam's gaze. Daja watches the lake and knows Polyam is watching her. She knows, says the voice in Daja's head, and that is why she was harsh.

"Out with it," Polyam says at last, half joking and half, Daja thinks, apprehension. "I won't pretend to be blind. You never avoided looking at me unless there was something you thought but couldn't say."

It is probably the truth, too.

She turns to Polyam, letting the other woman's face fill her vision for the first time. In the vivid light, Polyam's features gleam like they are made of bronze, and her scars have deeper shadows than she's ever seen. Her nose, her brows, thick and blunt and expressive in the smallest details, the slightest deviations from the perpetual sneer left by her accident over a decade ago.

Daja had planned for the words to stick in her throat, choking, but they slip out like they are as light as air. Hard facts have always passed more easily through her lips than her siblings', once she recognized the truth in them.

"It's time," Daja admits, "for me to go home."

- : -

Daja and Polyam exchange letters for a brief time after departing Gold Ridge. They are irregular and far between, but Daja finds it worth the wait to hear stories about one enraged nobleman trailing the caravan for a week, unwilling to believe that he had not been cheated, merely duped. Polyam writes about the lands north and east, where the faltering mines combine with droughts to create a situation much like Gold Ridge's. The horses cannot graze on the dust-choked ground, and the _lugsha_ are unbearably, but unsurprisingly, useless (unlike some smiths she knows), spending all day in their fire lit forges and shaping cherry-orange iron, but still unable to meet Idaram's very reasonable time constraints.

The last third or so of her letters always contain reports on her leg, but they become shorter each time. Daja pictures a dark hand carefully, competently, dipping a cloth into amber-colored oil and smoothing it across the prosthetic without any trouble at all. Eventually, the day-to-day details fade away too, which is both a curse and a blessing for someone who had made her choice, but still feels a fading ache for the rootless life of a Trader.

Daja's letters are just as irregular, but save the dying throes of her disastrous year, when she slaves to help contain Blue Pox, she doesn't have Polyam's excuse: no unscheduled work delivering foals and breaking in new horses. She starts off describing their journey south to warm Summersea, and how Tris manages to charm one of the donkeys into following her around, much to her secret pleasure, the duke's amusement, and Little Bear's obvious jealousy, but eventually realizes that what seems exciting to her, who lived through it, feels like wasted hours when recounted. The sights and sounds of Winding Circle are comfortably familiar, but she feels their confinement most when set against the jewel-like lakes and unavoidable forest trails Polyam's caravan clatters down.

And there are too many spaces, unfilled, between the full stops of each sentence; words she cannot put down even when she sits in the amber glow of a lamp and tries to do just that. Some things are too close to her heart to exchange with anyone not sharing a space in her head. Some things are too reliant on daily knowledge to exchange with anyone not sharing a home in Summersea.

Eventually the letters stop, and if Daja keeps them to stay solid when her memory falters - infinitely important, reminders are, when that is all one has left of someone dear - they're narrated by the voice of her own mind, not Polyam's.

- : -

**tbc**


End file.
